Right thing to do
by Kokis
Summary: What would you do if you happened to stumble over an awkward situation? Have you control of your true feelings? L is feeling sad, someone takes care of him...


**Disclaimer**: This story is based on the manga Deatn Note, written and illustrated by: Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. I dont claim any character here to be mine!

Music when writing this one:

Coffe and cigarettes – Michelle Featherstone

Feeling a moment – Feeder

Fischer – I will love you

**Summary**: What do you do if you hapen to stumble over an awkward situation? How do you comfort someone without getting to close? L is beeing sad, someone is taking care of him.

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_I have always believed you needed careful planning for everything. It always worked out better that way. I never did any major moves without first thinking carefully about every step of the way. But I guess I've learned with time that sometimes it's better to just follow your instincts. Sometimes the most unexpected, the least planned things are exactly the ones you are supposed to follow through. _

_L tought me that. _

ˆˆ ˆˆ

He was sitting crouched in a large red armchair as usual. Knees drawn up to his belly and toes cramping around the edge of the cushion. He had wrapped his arms around his legs, rocking slowly back and forth. Tense, and on his guard like as if he expected someone to come hopping up through the floor to take him. His eyes for once were not fixed at the televisionscreens covering the wall infront of him buzzing and flickering with light. They were staring at nothing at all, gaze directed at some unspecified area at the carpetcovered floor.

I couldn't say that I wasn't intriuged by this odd character. He was a genious. A genious hid behing a facade of a dishevelled look and lack of common manners. Suck as sitting properly in a chair and write on papers instead of tabletops just to mentions some.  
He was an agent. A specialagent assigned only for the few extra hard cases the ordinary NPA-members could not crack by themselves.

When you looked at him you could never have guessed. He looked like a slacker. Another one of those orphanage children who never had anyone to teach them polite and normal behaviour.

But his appearance wasn't the reason he was here. He was here to solve the mystery with all the hundreds of simultaneous heartattacks that seemed to occur uncontrollably all around the world, making the police believe they had to do with a highly interconnected international set of criminals working together to rid the world of it's trash.

As noone in the force understood the situation or even knew how to approach the problem they called in their last solution, or if you preferred: their trumpcard.

The guy called L.

After what I had heard L had never before shown his face or revealed his true identity to anyone. So for him to show up like this in person showed that this was a situation quite out of the ordinary.  
My first impression of him was that of dissappointment. After all the stories I had heard about him I had expected an older man, businessclass, wearing a flawless suit and sunglasses, briefcase in hand, cellphone glued to his ear and a rough attitude. Suitable for a legendary crook-catcher.

But no.

I ended up walking in on a guy, not so much older then myself, badly clad, messed up, goofy and just plain weird but with an intelect larger then the whole hotel he was staying in.  
L was, as he knew very well because he had been carefully working on some parts of it for a long time, a mystery.

A hardworking mystery at that. For all I knew he was working day and night. It didn't matter what time of the day you showed up, you would always find him sitting on the floor monitoring the 64 surveillancetapes he had from the hidden cameras he had put up in different households, or flipping through the endless stacks of notes and information he had been gathering. I wondered when he ever had the time to sleep...

That is the reason I was so surprised when I came into his hotelroom that night and found him like that. Unoccupied as he had never been before. He had appeared relaxed at times, but in those cases he had been snacking on sweets, piling sugar in different colour into stacks on the coffetable or any other unexplainable thing to keep his hands busy as his brain worked on everload as It often did these days.

Suddenly I felt insecure. I wasn't used to this. I mean, I could handle most kinds of situations smoothly, but overworked weirdos hugging their knees was a bit above the line even for me. How did you tackle that?

I decided to do as I usually did. Start with something and hope for the best to come out of it. So I crossed the floor and walked over to him.

Silently I sat down on the elbowrest half expecting him to flinch or withdraw. He didn't like people touching him and preferred if they didn't come too close either.

However, he didn't flinch. He barely reacted at all. A little twitch of his shoulders as the armchair creaked under the extra weight was all the reaction I got.

"L...?" I asked in a low voice.

He didn't answer me. Neither did he show any sign of weather he had heard me at all or not.

"L, are you alright?"

This time he looked at me. Peering out from behind his wild, dark fringe slowly shaking his head.

"You're not okey? Could you please tell me whats going on here? You're scaring me... "

It was true. He did scare me. This wasn't like him at all. I mean, sure he had always been weird and all but he had never spaced out like this before.

Without thinking I reached out a hand brushing a rebellious strand of hair away from his face revealing his huge black and frightened eyes. He was clearly scared of something. Me? Probably, I was definitely intruding on his personal space right now as my fingers lingered above his right ear, but there was something more than that going on too. He still hadn't answered me.

This didn't exactly go in the direction I had planned for it to go. I had expected him to atleast say something. Tell me what was going on so I could continue with my plans from there. But now I had to make up new ideas.

What did you do with someone who didn't make any sense and scared the shit out of you?

If he had been a normal person you could have hit him. To divert his attention to something else and then taken it from there. However, hitting L was not a good idea. He would probably freak out and leave the case or something just as stupid. And talking to him was out of the question, I had already tried that and clearly It didn't have any effect at all.

I stared at him for a while, until he looked away from me and continued with his swaying.

He looked so vulnarable. And so alone, clinging to himself for a support he wasn't sure to find. Most of all he reminded me of a little child who had lost his mother in the shopping mall sitting on the floor behing nearest shelf waiting for her to come back and save him.

But L didn't have any mother to save him now. All he had was... me? Was I the one supposed to save him?

If so? How the hell did you save someone who didn't give a single sign of wanting to be saved?

I tried the first thing that I could come up with. A hug. Simple as that. Giving him something else to cling to than himself.

Resolutely I put a hand on his slim shoulder, ignoring the slightly chocked look he gave me.

"L, just... just let me hold you, okey?" My own insecurity made my voice sound harsher then I had intended.

It was hard to read the expression in his eyes. It mediated too many things. Fright, loneliness, need, hope?  
Whatever it was he lowered his knees into a still weird but somewhat more easy position, stretching his thin arms towards me, enslosing me in himself.

He held me so tight It almost hurted, but I let him. I guessed noone had been holding him for a very long time. Then through all of the time we sat there quiet together, he didn't move a muscle. I might have felt a shiver run through him as I hesitantly ran a hand through his messy dark hair, but thats all. He was still as a statue in my arms.

I couldn't even hear him breath, and not myself either for that matter. Too afraid to spoil this odd but still precious moment. I just felt his chest heaving slowly against mine.

I dont know for how long we sat there before we broke the silence. It might have been just five minutes but it felt like an hour. I was so confused by It all I didn't really keep track of the time. L and I have never really been close. I wouldn't even say we're friends. We are colleagues on this case, and thats all. And yet he opens up like this to me. Why is he doing that? Does he trust me? I dont trust him. Hell, I don't even trust my own mom! No, he probably dont do that. Does he know something about me? Does he know I will never ever tell about this to anyone? Is that why? Cause I wont. No way I will tell someone I've been sitting here hugging another guy like a little baby. I would never tell anyone that it actuallly had felt good holding someone like that. Much more genuine than those girls I've been putting up with over the years for the sake of my reputation. I never felt anything for any of them. Well, I dont feel anything for L either. Trust me on that. I'm not some friggin gay! It's just... I guess I like playing the role of protector.What would people think of me if they knew that, me enjoying holding on to guys pretending I was important?

Maybe L felt all that, and maybe he wanted to keep this a secret too.

It was he who pierced the silence first. Or more likely, his breath did it for him. A kind of highpitched breath, caught in his throat, cut in the middle. It was a weird sound and I didn't immediately realize that he was crying. Not before I felt his cold hands start to shiver against my back.

Well, this just kept getting better and better. A crying weirdo, yihoo! I thought sarcastically. But I couldn't really stay unaffected by it. It was impossible too, when being this close. I felt every rack of his body, heard every heldback sob he made even though he tried his best to surpress them.

I guess orpans learned how to be discrete to avoid attention from the other curious eyes at the orphanage.

It was kind of scary, I had never taken care of someone who were crying before. Just girls after I dumped them. And those I didn't even care about anyway.

I hated the feeling of awkwardness it gave me. Usually I just walked away from people when I didn't like a situation, like the badass that I am. But I couldn't really get away from this one, now could I? Clumsily I adjusted us so that his head came to rest against my collarbone and I could whisper in his ear, even though I had no idea what was the right thing to say.

" It's okey now, L. It's okey... I'm here... "

I felt a bit ridiculous saying that. It was such a well-used cliché in all those sappy romantic movies I was always forced to watch by the women in our household. However, cliché or not, they did seem to have effect.

L's fingers tightly clenched around my shirt as he was overwhelmed by tears. Unable to hold them back any longer.

I still had no idea what he was so sad about. I had no clue at all as he hadn't said anything.

It was little weird, because usually he was definitely blessed with the power of speach.. He could hold almost long monologues about tactics or conclusions he had made and he never seemed nervous about talking in public, but when it came down to himself there was apparently a whole different matter.

So I didn't know and I didn't expect to get an answer either. All I could do was beeing there for him now when he needed me. Holding him up as his walls fell to pieces all around him.

Because they were, and they were falling fast. One piece with every tear finding its way down along his cheeks. One with each whimper ripped from his throat. Piece by piece, to diminish into nothingness leaving himself naked on the inside forced to rely on others to get back up on his feet again. And If he was willing to let me in, to let me se who he really were behind all his fancy speaking and carefree attitude, If he would really let me see him the way I saw him now, friend, foe or whatever, I was willing to be there to support him all the way.

Because everybody deserves life.

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Wiiie! Complete at last! )

For L. Pretty little L. Might be more stories from Death Note. hehe


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